The screen saver: Secret Cinema's mission to save the movies

Gallery: The screen saver: Secret Cinema's mission to save the movies

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This article was taken from the June 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Fabien Riggall is arguing with a sheep. "Will you just move?" he asks. "We're trying to do a site visit." The site in question is a country estate north of London, Riggall is the founder of Future Cinema, which turns films into live events, and the sheep is in his way. After some persuasion, it shuffles off and Riggall continues picking his way across the muddy ground. It's a cold, grey late-February day and the light is as flat as the countryside. Accompanied by two of his production team and the daughter of the estate's owner, Riggall is "trying to get a feel for how people would move across the site". They're looking for the "heart" of the location, which will provide the hub of the narrative: "We engineer it so there's a flow, but also freedom and discovery," he explains.

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Since 2007, Secret Cinema, a subsidiary of Future Cinema, has sold 120,000 film tickets without telling the audience what the film is. Its tagline is: "Tell no one". Each production spills a film's narrative into the real world. Riggall has stripped his customers of their underwear and imprisoned them in cells; filled Alexandra Palace with camels; and held simultaneous screenings in London and Kabul. Over 17 productions of movies, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Prometheus, Secret Cinema has blurred the line between film and reality.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: November 2010. Attendees were admitted to a psychiatric hospital (the Princess Louise Hospital) and "treated".

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Riggall is in the countryside to take that format to a logical-yet-insane progression with Secret Cinema's most ambitious project to date: Secret Festival, a late-summer event centred around a film that 5,000 people will live for 72 hours. "We want to make a narrative for an entire weekend," the 37-year-old says. "The site is the stage." There will be no lineup; to find out when -- or even if -- a band is playing, people will have to talk to each other. While they're there, I want them to connect with each other," says Riggall. "It's beyond technology." As for what the film will be -- well, that's a secret.

Riggall comes to a blocked gate: "Great -- cows." He negotiates his way through the herd and follows a road through the trees. The woods clear and Riggall looks over a lake, with the 17th-century hall of the estate visible in the distance. "This is it," he announces. He and Jemma Cowley, a freelance production manager, discuss how the audience would approach the site and what they would see. Cowley's job is to turn Riggall's ambition into an event. "It's a battle between Fabien and me," she says. "I do the sensible, boring stuff." In Riggall's mind, the empty grounds are being filled with performers, tents and caravans. He's found the heart.

Riggall wants more, though. In May, Secret Cinema held its biggest event yet, across London, New York and Athens; in London alone, 40,000 people visited 12 floors of a building over the course of the production. Up to now, Riggall's events have taken celluloid stories off screen; now he wants his immersive fiction itself to influence real life. "We've got an opportunity to create a secret movement," Riggall says. "I truly believe that secrets can be kept by millions of people."

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Suspicious-looking attendees of Casablance are hauled from the queue by "Vichy French soldiers"

Shamil Tanna

Secret Cinema has an origin story straight from the movies. When Riggall was 11, his father, Simon, was offered a job running a bank in Casablanca, and he moved his family from the Isle of Man, where Riggall was born, to Morocco. "One day, I went to this old cinema in Casablanca on my own," Riggall remembers. "I left on this really hot day and headed for a cinema called Dawliz, but didn't know anything about the film. There was quite a small audience. I sat there and watched this film, which was incredibly violent, incredibly epic, a beautiful film. The protagonist, at the beginning, was this 11-year-old, Noodles. It's such an immersive film -- I thought I was the kid and lived that film." The movie was Sergio Leone's Once upon a Time in America and was, for Riggall, "a turning point. It was this feeling of a journey, and an event. I always remember that."

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Riggall is sitting in Future Cinema's office in a converted warehouse in Hackney's London Fields, where he employs 12 people. In conversation he can be elusive: he jumps from topic to topic, his blue eyes lighting up with each new idea. With his beard, he looks like a raggedy professor. Riggall sees opportunities for stories everywhere, constantly projecting his imagination on to real life; at one meeting, at a London brasserie, his first thought was to wish that the staff spoke only French and served food as brusquely as Parisian waiters. His speech is full of play, sometimes offering deliberately ludicrous answers to questions to see how that version of reality sounds, whether it's entertaining (Why did your father move your family around so much? "He was a drug dealer."). Riggall is wary of saying too much about Secret Cinema -- he knows its mystery is its appeal. "I'm asking people to tell no one, so how can I tell you everything?"

The Warriors: September 2009. A "real" gang broke into the London Fields-held production of Walter Hill's classic film about American gang culture.

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A year after he saw Once upon a Time in America, Riggall swapped Casablanca for a Cheltenham boarding school, when his father moved to London. He would sneak off to go to the local cinema. "I was pretty disruptive and I went to quite a few schools" -- Alleyne's in London, then Hurtwood House in Surrey. After failing to get into drama school he did odd jobs until, aged 20, he went to New York for a three-month film-making course, paid for by his father. There, he shot a short film on 16mm, based on The Collector, the novel by John Fowles.

On his return to London in 1997, Riggall spent three years working as a runner on film sets. "I wanted to be a producer but wasn't sure how to get there." He left to work at a telephone sales company where he met film-maker Jamie Rafn. Riggall offered to produce a short film of his called She Loves Me She Loves Me Not. He watched more shorts and eventually hosted a night at the Ginglik cinema in Shepherd's Bush in 2003. "A hundred and twenty people came, film-makers presented their films. It was social and fun, like a mixtape, curated." Riggall had spent months compiling the master DVD for what he eventually called Future Shorts.

The DVD went to six cinemas around the UK and Riggall struck a partnership with Picturehouse cinemas to license the mixtape, then found partners in Belgium and Paris. He took the format to music festivals such as Glastonbury, with 24-hour screenings. Future Shorts now shows in 90 countries and has a web TV channel; for Riggall, it's not a format so much as a network: "You connect everyone through lots of different areas.

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Someone finds out about Future Shorts, they hear about it through Secret Cinema, they connect online -- it's all the same."

An empty school in Hackney became a prison for Secret Cinema's 2012 Shawshank Redemption.

Shamil Tanna

Future Shorts challenged the traditional notion of the film festival. Riggall wanted to find out how to turn it into something more social and reach audiences beyond the film-festival circuit, but he wanted to go further than just screenings. "How can we create a film experience that's more like a nightclub? There's music and there's performance and there's art and you dress up."

He launched Future Cinema in 2005 as "live cinema"; 1,000 people attended a screening of Dreams Money Can Buy, an experimental film from 1947. Riggall put on gypsy and flamenco bands; audio-visual group The Light Surgeons created an installation.

By 2007, Riggall had created two formats that relied on the power of online networks to spread (today, Future Cinema says it has an online community of 2.8 million). His next project, though, would modify that digital approach. He thought back to the Casablanca cinema and connected it to the secret areas of Glastonbury and raves in the late 80s, where people would set off in cars and find out their destination along the way. "The idea of discovery and becoming part of a secret group of people. What if we could do what we did with Future Cinema, but tell people absolutely nothing?"

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[pullquote source="KeepInline]
In December that year, in a disused railway tunnel in London Bridge, Riggall and his team of six sprayed graffiti on walls, filled bins with fire and built skate ramps, retelling Gus Van Sant's [i]Paranoid Park[/i], a film about a skater who accidentally kills a security guard, in real life. Four hundred people bought tickets without knowing a thing about the evening ahead. The next film was [i]Funny Face[/i], the 1957 musical starring Audrey Hepburn, as a bookshop employee who becomes a model. Riggall set his version in the fashion world during London Fashion Week and made his set a catwalk, designing clothes for the production. "People don't just want to come," he says. "They want to be part of it in a way that they want to consume every piece of it. There's going to be a massive shift in the way people create, in the way that culture is experienced. The division between culture and real life is moving."

For the most part, the stories we were told through the 20th century were just that: stories told to us.

The printing press, radio, cinema and TV all offered new narrative possibilities, but drew a sharp line between creator and audience.

The first blurring of this line came in 1975, when programmer Will Crowther created a text-based computer game called Colossal Cave Adventure. The narrator of this story did something odd: he asked his reader for one- and two-word commands. The roles of author and reader were no longer so distinct. The game spread through ARPANET, which Crowther was helping to build, and which would itself lead to the second blur: the advent of the internet.

The Harder They Come: June 2009. A procession of Jamaica-themed floats and cars full of "gangsters" filled the Elephant and Castle streets before the film.

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Frank Rose writes in his book The Art of Immersion that the internet is "a chameleon". "It is the first medium that can act like all media -- it can be text, or audio, or video, or all of the above. It is nonlinear, thanks to the world wide web and the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking. It is inherently participatory -- not just interactive, in the sense that it responds to your commands, but an instigator constantly encouraging you to comment, contribute, join in. And it is immersive -- meaning that you can use it to drill down as deeply as you like about anything you care to." According to Rose: "A new type of narrative is emerging -- one that's told through many media at once... designed above all to be immersive."

Traditional broadcast shows started borrowing techniques from video games and other digital media; TV show

Lost built a universe online for its fans; in 2010, four Doctor Who episodes were online role-playing games.

In the UK, in particular, the increasingly participatory nature of media has been spilling over into real life, a third blur: "Secret Cinema is the next step in participatory culture," Rose tells Wired. Chuck Tryon, author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence, calls Secret Cinema "an evolution of cinema". It's an evolution that is both reaction and comment to the technologies that have enabled participative storytelling online. As Tom Chatfield, the author of

Netymology, recently wrote in Aeon magazine: "We are metaphorically dismembered by our tools: regarded by the sites and services we visit as 'eyeballs', as tapping and touching fingertips."

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Telling stories in real life re-embodies narratives.

Felix Barrett founded immersive-theatre company Punchdrunk in 2000. "It's because we live in a digital age; we carry second screens around with us," says the 27-year-old. "Everything is so immediate and accessible that we can have whatever our heart desires in seconds. So what we find is that an audience actually wants to work for something. They want to feel alive. This is so visceral and immediate and tactile, their responses are much stronger."

Punchdrunk has used entire buildings to tell Edgar Allen Poe stories. It has extended the experience across weekends and borders: with Punchdrunk Travel, audience members buy tickets and make their way to an airport, without knowing anything about the production or where they are going; the journey is the show. In 2011, Punchdrunk put on an immersive version of Macbeth called Sleep No More in New York, which audiences could experience simultaneously in real life and online; this month it returns with its biggest London show to date, The Drowned Man.

Guests at Casablanca in March 2013 listen to jazz bands and are offered food from the film's Blue Parrot restaurant.

Shamil Tanna

Punchdrunk and Secret Cinema pioneered in real life (IRL) storytelling. A number of companies, also based around east London, have followed their lead, including Shunt, You Me Bum Bum Train and Retz, which was founded by Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett. In March, Retz staged an immersive version of Franz Kafka's The Trial in several buildings throughout east London, online and on film. "The ley line here in east London seems to be powerful for creating words," says Barrett. "The influence of video games is that people want to be the protagonists of the story." IRL storytelling is not just kicking against digital life; all these companies incorporate technology, and especially social media, into their narratives. "We're trying to explore what that digital identity is," Barrett explains. "Our work is very much informed by the internet and the digital revolution. We have a networked approach."

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[Quote"]Four hundred people bought tickets for Paranoid Park without knowing a thing about the evening ahead[/pullquote]

Secret Cinema depends on social media, according to Tryon: "This kind of event is much easier planned using social and viral media technologies." Riggall, despite his avowed wariness of technology, is a savvy operator of it. For one recent production, audience members were assigned characters, which each had a Facebook profile. They were encouraged to take photos of themselves in transit to the event, publish them online, and interact with other characters on the site, some of whom were Future Cinema actors playing a part.

These UK-based, real-life storytelling companies have shown that consumers want narratives -- and will pay for them. As the cinemagoing population dwindles (in 2011, the number of people visiting cinemas reached a 16-year low in the US and Canada, according to hollywood.com), Secret Cinema has convinced thousands of people to pay nearly £50 to see a film, and usually an old one at that. A six-week run of The Third Manin 2011 attracted 19,000 audience members; in 2012 Secret Cinema's Shawshank Redemption took, including drinks and food sales, £1.7 million. Riggall is working more and more closely with the film industry to capitalise on this; last summer, he struck a deal with Fox to show the Ridley Scott title Prometheus at the same time as it ran in cinemas; 25,000 people went to 38 screenings and the production took more than the film's run at the BFI Imax. Riggall thinks that the marketing benefit of showing current releases is great: "It's off-billboard advertising. We get people to really engage with a film in a way they don't at the multiplex."

[ImageLibrary##304355/Any##Title¬Prometheus##Description¬June 2012.
During its June 2012 run, a total of 25,000 "Brave New Venture employees" met near Euston station for the Prometheus screening.]

At the time of writing, Riggall was in talks with another studio to secure more concurrent showings, yet it's not a proven business model. He is unwilling to talk specifics, but Companies House records show that in 2010, the company lost £624,481; in 2011, the most recent records available, this had fallen to £574,167. Although the operation has expanded since then, each project is still very capital intensive. Riggall claims that Future Cinema and Secret Cinema took a total of £3.5 million in ticket sales in 2012, although he won't reveal operating costs. "You can tell from the detail and love we put in that we are building this for the audience. But the exciting thing is where we could go."

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Putting on a Secret Cinema show is an exercise in controlled chaos. "It's all slightly random -- no, a beautifully formed random," says Riggall. "If you look at the number of productions we've done, that's the thing that people don't get, the level of work we put in. Because of time issues, we have to be ultra creative, ultra quick. That's the charm of it. It's the edge.

I see it as riding the edge of culture."

[Quote##Riggall's ultimate vision is even more grand.

He wants to patent Future Cinema as a format. "On the posters, it won't be 'See it in 3D'. It will be: 'Live it in Future Cinema.'"####KeepInline]

The process is opportunistic. The location is the starting point because, according to Ed Williams, Future Cinema's head of locations, "films are easier to find than buildings." For the production of The Shawshank Redemption, Williams discovered a former school in Hackney lying unoccupied. He took Riggall, who had been looking to put on The Shining. "This building was amazing," he says. "It didn't have that sense of isolation, but it felt very much like a prison." Future Cinema had recently put on a free production of La Haine at the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, as a "reaction to the riots". Shawshank was an evolution of this idea.

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Once the building was secured, Riggall could start planning. "It's about looking at the building, the capacity, the flow," he says. "How do you build a flow? How do you build a truthful world? It's imagining how 400 audience members would react to a world, and giving them an experience in which every single moment there's a beat." These beats are drawn on to a whiteboard, which eventually becomes a huge, detailed visualisation of the layout. At the same time, Riggall auditions the actors, all of whom will be paid. "We have a network of actors -- it's a very specific skill. It's amazing to do, but hugely tiring. We cast specifically for every production."

For Lawrence of Arabia at Alexandra Palace in 2010, he hired Arab actors; for a recent Future Cinema production, bilingual actors to give a multinational feel.

Riggall takes the actors through the visualisation, with the production scheduled to the minute. "It seems like people are making their own adventure, but behind the scenes, at 6.30pm, this action happens," Cowley says. "It's absolutely engineered,"

Riggall says. The results can be spectacular. At

Shawshank, "prisoners" receiving group therapy in one room looked out on to the courtyard. They happened to see Tommy Williams speaking with prison warden Samuel Norton, then be gunned down. In the film, the pivotal scene is shot up-close, from a bystander's point-of-view. In the Secret Cinema version, onlookers watched the murder happen through the window, from a distance, in silence: the point-of-view had shifted, producing a stronger feeling of helplessness and injustice than in the film. "Not everyone will see everything," Riggall says. "Some people missed Tommy being shot.

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But you create enough moments for everyone to build their own narrative."

The Shawshank Redemption: November 2012. On arrival, audience members were stripped by prison detention guards before being allowed to take part.

There were only two months between Future Cinema securing the building until the opening night of The Shawshank Redemption. For this May's Secret Cinema project -- vastly more ambitious in scale and concept, showing in different locations around the world -- Riggall has had six weeks. More than 500

Shawshank Redemption participants wrote letters which were subsequently posted to inmates of UK prisons, and, on behalf of Amnesty International, to foreign embassies in Iran, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Turkey, petitioning for the release of journalists and activists. For the next production, Riggall wants to extend the impact of real-world activities -- especially digital media and smartphones -- as the first step in his Secret Youth project. "In Shawshank, there were elements of the performance around the building where people found they're part of a real project. With every production, we create an enterprise -- we produce things we sell for charity." Riggall envisions a "network of secret, pop-up museums", where young people can create art and start businesses under mentorship. He's visited Downing Street to discuss the project and hopes to secure funding. In March, Future Cinema announced that the Old Cardinal Pole School, used for Shawshank screenings, will be used as a pop-up community centre, film set and gym.

Riggall's ultimate vision is even more grand. He wants to patent Future Cinema as a format. "On the posters, it won't be 'See it in 3D'. It will be: 'Live it in Future Cinema.'"

After that, he wants to own the means of production itself. "The future is producing our own films that become events."

Riggall recently returned to Casablanca. Not the city, but a version he created in an East End cinema, for a Future Cinema showing of the film. The Troxy was transformed into Rick's Café Américaine: a band played next to a table filled by a party wearing the uniforms of the Third Reich; chips were raked across roulette tables.

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Riggall's father Simon was there, too, dressed in a jacket and tie. Riggall wore a blue suit retrieved from Future Cinema's costume department. Both wore fedoras. "Do you think I look like a young Humphrey Bogart?" he asked his father.

This night was the start of a new partnership with the venue; Future Cinema will show the film four nights a week for the indefinite future, splitting revenues. Riggall wants to export the format to other UK cities. As the story unspooled in front of the 800 ticket-buyers -- Ugarte arrested by Captain Renault, the arrival of Victor Laszlo -- Riggall thought back to his visit to the Moroccan cinema when he watched Once Upon a Time in America. "Noodles owned that world. This..." he gestures, "...is how I want the world to be."

At his first few events, Riggall would, at the end of the performance, stand up and thank everyone for coming. "But that broke the world," he says. Tonight, he keeps himself to himself. As "La Marseillaise" strikes up, he mouths the words, lost in the crowd.

This article was first published in the June 2013 issue of WIRED magazine